I know, lines of speech are the only memorable things in an otherwise average game, why? Well, when you first powered on Altered Beast and heard Zeus beckon those words to you in crystal clear sound (which wasn’t really that crystal clear), you had to be impressed. I for one couldn’t believe my ears. The best sound effect I had heard in a console game up to that point was “We’re bad!”, from the Data East NES game Bad Dudes. When I heard and saw Altered Beast over a friends house for the first time, I knew it was almost time to put my ole favorite, the 8-bit NES on the shelf, and begin saving for Segas’ new 16-bit machine.

Now onto the gameplay of Altered Beast. It’s a conversion of Sega’s side-scrolling beat-em-up released in arcades in 1988. Sega kept it as close as they could to the original, leaving the arcade’s 2-player simultaneously play intact. Unfortunately, this does not improve the game in any way. It’s often too crowded on the screen as it is. Your character is huge and so are your enemies giving you a cramped feeling while playing. You move left and right and have three buttons, punch, kick and jump. Not too much combat here for a beat-em-up that’s for sure.

In each of the game’s five very short stages you’ll face the same five or six fairly lame undead creatures. Within each stage, you’ll have to obtain three “Spirit Balls” (or power-ups) from defeating three white two-headed wolves. The first of these power-ups will give you “giant-man” strength. The second grants you “superman” strength and the third will transform you into a mighty Altered Beast, giving the player some extremely powerful abilities and a very cool transformation screen. The five transformations include the Werewolf, Ware-dragon, Ware-bear,Were-tiger, and for the game’s finally you’ll finish off Neff using the Golden Werewolf.

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